A motley crew of tech firms have banded together to launch a new certificate authority initiative called “Let’s Encrypt”, that hopes to make the World Wide Web a safer place to be.

Let’s Encrypt, which is backed by Akamai Technologies Inc, Cisco Systems, Inc., the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Mozilla Foundation, comes at a time when encryption is all the rage in the tech industry, following revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance.

The NSA revelations, plus stories of massive credit card breaches at major retailers, have a lot of people thinking that the Internet isn’t nearly as safe as they’d like to think it is. The secure HTTPS protocol is one way to avoid being spied upon over public networks, but the vast majority of websites don’t have HTTPS connections thanks to the drawn-out and expensive process of getting a digital public-key certificate.

“For many server operators, getting even a basic server certificate is just too much of a hassle,” explains Let’s Encrypt in its pitch. “The application process can be confusing. It usually costs money. It’s tricky to install correctly. It’s a pain to update.”

It can also take up to an hour for an experienced programmer to set up a secure web server, explains Let’s Encrypt. As a result, most smaller websites just don’t bother.

Let’s Encrypt is aiming to make it easier for smaller sites to get their hands on a certificate, and it’s also making certificates free. All it takes is two simple shell commands for a webmaster to enable HTTPS on their site using Let’s Encrypt. That ensures that all certificates will be public, while its protocols will be made open-source so other certificate authorities can adopt them.

Let’s Encrypt won’t be able to offer complete encryption. Any site that offers third-party content won’t be entirely protected, but still the initiative is a step in the right direction.

A number of other leading tech firms have been pushing for greater encryption in recent weeks. Most notably, Apple Inc. introduced encryption for its latest iOS 8 platform, while Google did the same for its new Android 5.0 Lollipop OS. It’s a good thing for privacy-minded consumers, even though it’s proving to be less popular inside law enforcement circles.

Photo credit: Yuri Yu. Samoilov via photopin cc